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AOL Acquires Technology Blog Network TechCrunch

AOL has made a major move in its bid to reinvent itself as a new media juggernaut, acquiring popular technology news publication TechCrunch and its associated properties.

Rumors of the deal emerged on Monday evening, with both GigaOm and The Wall Street Journal reporting that that the two companies were in negotiations.

The acquisition was formally announced in rather dramatic fashion earlier this afternoon at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, where AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and TechCrunch Founder and Co-editor Michael Arrington took the stage to announce and sign the agreement, as well as answer a few questions from members of the audience (Armstrong actually published the news to TechCrunch from the stage too).

Armstrong and Arrington did not disclose terms, though CNBC’s Julia Boorstin reports that the price is "about $40 million."

At AOL, TechCrunch becomes the centerpiece of a technology news publishing outfit that already includes Engadget, Switched, TUAW and Download Squad. In a statement Armstrong said, “TechCrunch and its team will be an outstanding addition to the high-quality content on the AOL Technology Network, which is now a must-buy for advertisers seeking to associate their brands with leading technology content and its audience.”

Asked on-stage about what the deal might mean editorially given the scope of the publications (TechCrunch also runs CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, and TechCrunchIT, among other sites) now under the AOL roof, Armstrong said, “We talked to Mike and [TechCrunch CEO] Heather and we agreed that there's an opportunity to have a much larger tech presence as a whole. I would expect these brands to operate independently but leverage each other when needed and build a much more significant content audience for tech.”

Arrington, who founded the site in 2005 and still breaks many of its biggest stories, will remain a part of TechCrunch for at least three years as part of the deal, thanks in part to what he described on-stage as “incentives.”

The TechCrunch deal builds on an already busy day for AOL on the acquisition front; earlier this morning, the company announced that it had acquired 5min, a video syndication platform.

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